This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on April 7, 2010.
At 538.com, Tom Schaller has taken on the task (using some of Jonah Goldberg’s loose utterances on “Tax Freedom Day” as a foil) of explaining that the total tax burden of Americans is relatively low as compared to residents European countries, and that U.S. tax and spending policies do very little to redistribute income from the top to the bottom.
I don’t know if Tom’s analysis will cut much ice with conservatives who typically think of Europe as a decadent socialist backwater, but his posts do raise some pretty important distinctions about conservative anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric and the popular attitudes they are designed to exploit.
Conservatives often make economic arguments for smaller government and lower taxes, based largely on the notion that government programs, taxes and regulations are essentially parasitical and thus drain resources and vitality from the wealth-generating private sector. These arguments, of course, are readily debatable through the use of empirical data on macroeconomic performance, and conservatives frequently struggle with the fact that some of the most explosive economic booms in U.S. history have occurred under “liberal” national management and in periods of high marginal tax rates (not to mention the economic success of more “socialist” countries).
But the kind of anti-governement, anti-tax arguments that are becoming especially prevelant today (particularly with the rise of the Tea Party Movement and its strong influence on the Republican Party) are essentially moral: government activity illegitimately redistributes income from virtuous people to less virtuous people, and its size and weight are eroding basic liberties. These arguments, obviously enough, aren’t immediately subject to empirical verification or repudiation. And being moral arguments, they tend to be invested with an emotional intensity that you don’t generally see in discussions of GDP growth rates.
I’m personally convinced that at the emotional heart of today’s most passionate anti-government sentiment is the belief that a coalition of rich elitists and shiftless underclassers–perfectly represented by the community-organizing Ivy Leaguer Barack Obama–are looting the virtuous middle class to bail out bankers and welfare-moochers alike. There’s unavoidably a racial subtext to this belief, but it’s certainly possible to hold it without any conscious racial sentiment at all; after all, most people who think of themselves as “virtuous” don’t find racism virtuous at all.
This belief has been fed by decades of conservative rhetoric about the “New Class” of unproductive elitists who hold bourgeois values in contempt, and who seek power via manipulation of favor-seeking poor and minority people. And now this anti-middle-class alliance seems to be running the country. Having wrecked the economy via profitable but fradulent mortgages given to uncreditworthy people, they’ve bailed themselves out and are now trying to hold on by bribing voters with still more goodies at taxpayer expense, from stimulus dollars aimed at maintaining public employment rolls to universal health coverage.
Many progressives view this belief system as too ridiculous to take seriously. After all, isn’t the demographic category most hostile to Obama in general, and to health reform in particular–white seniors–disqualified from anti-government feelings because of its dependence on (and fierce support for) Social Security and Medicare? Not necessarily. As I argued at the beginning of the health reform battle, most seniors view Social Security and Medicare as earned benefits, not as “welfare” or “redistribution” in any real sense. This, in fact, is the reality that progressive single-payer fans don’t quite grasp when they advocate “Medicare for all” as a can’t-miss political proposition. Many seniors would violently oppose making “their” Medicare benefits available to people who haven’t been paying payroll taxes for forty to fifty years, and who haven’t, more generally, proved their virtue by a lifetime of rules-observing and often unrewarding work.
So what can progressives do about this moral argument against government and taxes? It obviously would help to dissociate liberalism from corporate welfare in any form: to treat TARP and the auto industry bailouts as essential emergency measures rather than a permanent industrial policy, and to stress the public accountability via regulation that comes with government “aid.” More fundamentally, some educational efforts are clearly in order laying out the basic facts about the actual size of government and taxes, its actual beneficiaries, and the actual impact of conservative policies–the sort of educational efforts at which unions have excelled for so many years. It is helpful to explain to seniors that Social Security and (particularly) Medicare aren’t really self-financing forced savings programs or “earned benefits.” And the loonier conspiracy-theory arguments, such as the very popular but completely hallucinatory idea that “liberals” are conspiring to take away gun ownership rights, should simply be mocked as the fabrications they are.
But the broader effort must be to tear down the alienation of middle-class folk from government and liberalism, and build up a sense of solidarity with the national community as a whole, and with the people who need an active public sector to cope with the universal risks and pitfalls of contemporary life. Plenty of “virtuous” people are not treated very well by our economic system, and they look a lot more like middle-class Tea Party activists than like the well-heeled people (viz. the Young Eagles) richly rewarded by the Invisible Hand of the marketplace regardless of merit, whose economic ideology the Tea Party Movement has adopted.
Ultimately, progressives must convince as many Americans as possible that an active but accountable public sector is not antithetical, but is actually essential, to basic traditional values like “freedom,” and to a society in which individual “virtue” is understood as something to be enabled and expanded, not angrily defended as a fixed and endangered commodity. How we talk about “middle-class values,” not just on “cultural issues” but on core economic issues, will go a long way towards determining whether we can maintain the Democratic Party’s longstanding position as the party of the masses, not the classes.

This item by J.P. Green was first published on April 2, 2010.
I’ve been a little wary of Drew Westen’s argument that the failures of Democrats in politics derive from over-reliance on reason-based appeals, while the Republicans win their victories by connecting with voters’ emotions. I felt he may have over-stated his case, since I know lots of people who make elegant rational arguments for or against politicians based on positions on the issues.
But Westen makes a very strong case for the persuasive power of emotion over reason in politics in his CNN commentary “Why Obama won the health care battle.” This time, Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” applies his theory to explain the course of the HCR struggle, and it fits impressively.

Politicians tend to think about how the minds and brains of voters work in one of two ways.
The first is to assume that voters come to decisions on issues like health care reform by carefully examining the data and the arguments and then calculating whether one plan or another better fits their rational self-interest. In this view, a campaign is a debate on the issues.
When you hear (or heard) Democratic strategists dismiss polls showing that the majority of Americans opposed the president’s health care plan but support its component parts, this is the model of the mind of the voter they are assuming.
That’s why Democrats tend to lose ground even on issues with strong popular support, like health care reform, which was extremely popular during the 2008 election but steadily lost backing over the course of the first year of the Obama administration until regaining some momentum over the past few weeks.

Westen argues that HCR got serious traction when President Obama and the Democrats embraced the alternative view of “voters is as people who have to be sold on a policy or candidate. They are consumers, not debaters, and they’ll walk out of a store that doesn’t have attentive salespeople.” The winning strategy, according to Westen:

How do you sell reform? You tell a consistent story about what’s wrong with the system, who broke it and how we can fix it. You evoke not only people’s concerns about their interests but their values: fairness, the ability to choose what’s best for themselves and their family, security.
You try to get people as passionate as you are, concerned about the security of their care, angry at insurance companies that have been calling all the shots and hopeful that you know what to do about it. And you choose your words carefully, because words carry emotional connotations, and people may not know exactly what’s in a bill, but they have a general sense of whether they like it.
This is how Republicans tend to think about politics. And it’s how they managed to leave Americans with a bitter taste in their mouths about efforts to reform a health care system that had left virtually all of us one pre-existing condition — or one cancer requiring treatment that exceeded our annual or lifetime “cap” — away from medical bankruptcy, no matter how good we thought our insurance was.

For too long, argues Westen, Dems were over-using emotionally-constipated phrases such as “universal health care” and “health insurance reform” that “don’t exactly make your spine tingle.” Meanwhile Republicans were tapping the power of emotional appeals, like calling HCR “Obamacare” and “a government takeover” of our health care system that would “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Further,

For a year, while the Republicans were telling a great story about “death panels” and the president’s “socialist” agenda (though the president wouldn’t even support the “socialist” option of giving Americans the option of buying into Medicare if they preferred it over private insurance), the White House wasn’t offering a coherent story.
Precisely what problem the plan was intended to fix seemed to shift from week to week (Was it cost? Or the 46 million people without insurance? Or middle-class people losing their coverage?). And as for the plot, we didn’t know until a few weeks ago what the president’s plan even was.
Making matters worse, Obama seemed to lack passion about his signature issue. Everything seemed negotiable, as if what mattered was that the bill passed, not what was in it. And the White House used every word in the book you wouldn’t use if you wanted to “sell” reform.
Instead of emphasizing that people who work for a living ought to be able to take their kids to the doctor when they’re sick — a value statement that makes clear who the bill was designed to help (people who work for a living and still can’t get or afford decent health care, or could lose their insurance if they lost or changed jobs or started a small business) — the White House talked about “bending the cost curve,” another linguistic heart-stopper.

But the tide changed, Westen says, when President Obama began “telling a compelling story”:

….This story actually included the villains: Health insurance companies denying life-saving care to people for profits. In speeches journalists described as his most “passionate” since becoming president, he told the story of a woman who lost her life after she lost her health insurance and of a little boy who lost his mother because she couldn’t pay for her illness. He seized on an insurance rate hike of nearly 40 percent in California to mobilize populist anger.
And for the first time, the president decided to answer the attacks of his opponents, not just with well-reasoned arguments (which he did) but with attitude. When John McCain started posturing at the president’s “bipartisan” summit, the president reminded him that the election was over and who had won. When House Minority Leader John Boehner started rattling off talking points, the president responded with the verbal equivalent of eye rolling and asked whether there was someone who actually wanted to get something done…The president looked strong, resolute and passionate.

Looking ahead, Westen sees a critical choice for the white house:

…He can return to the “why can’t we all just get along?” unilateral bipartisanship that tied him up in knots in his first year, as if Republicans are just Democrats in need of rational arguments.

Or, better,

…Obama can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, dare the Republicans to vote no on every effort to fix every problem the country faces and pursue the pragmatic (sometimes partisan, sometimes nonpartisan) leadership the American people want.

And if the President can bring some of the passion he displays so well in his speeches into his press conferences, interviews and televised appeals, he can brighten prospects for the mid-terms, his re-election and the future of his party.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 26, 2010, and was cross-posted at The Huffington Post.
The more I think about it, the fight over a Supreme Court nomination that we are likely to see beginning in a month or so could be a major teachable moment for progressives about the underlying belief system of contemporary conservatives and of Republicans who have let themselves get radicalized to an extraordinary degreee since the latter stages of the 2008 presidential contest.
As we speak, conservatives all over the country are demanding legal action by states to challenge the constitutionality of health reform legislation (in my home state of Georgia, there’s even talk of impeaching the Democratic Attorney General, Thurbert Baker, for refusing to waste taxpayer dollars by launching a suit). Yet the basis for such suits-typically a denial of the power of Congress to legislative economic matters under the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the U.S. Constitution–is a collateral attack on the constitutionality of a vast array of past legislation, including the New Deal and Great Society initiatives, not to mention most civil rights laws.
And that questionable proposition is completely aside from other conservative efforts, many of them backed by major Republican officeholders, to “interpose” (to use the term for this strategy when it was deployed by segregationists in the 1950s) state sovereignty to block the implementation of health reform and other federal laws. And beyond that we have the even more radical nullification and secession gestures that have become standard features of conservative Republican rhetoric over the last year or so.
In other words, a debate that revolves around constitutional interpretation is not necessarily one that will help the conservative movement at this particular moment. Indeed, it could actually help progressives raise suspicions that Republicans are contemplating a very radical agenda if they return to power, one that could include (particularly given the stridency of their fiscal rhetoric lately) a direct assault on very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Moreover, we can anticipate that a Court nomination fight will renew noisy efforts by the Christian Right, which has good reason right now to remind the news media and Republican politicians alike of its continuing power in the GOP, to advance its own eccentric views on America as a “Christian Nation” whose founders never intended to promote church-state separation, not to mention their demands for an overthrow of legalized abortion and same-sex unions. At a time when many conservatives are trying very hard to submerge divisive cultural issues and create a monomaniacal message on limited government, a Court fight will unleash cultural furies beyond control.
And finally, if it really gets vicious, a Court fight could cast a harsh spotlight on the drift of the conservative movement towards a general attitude of defiance towards the rule of law. As I noted in a post yesterday, the downside of the libertarian energy given conservatives by the Tea Party movement is its tendency to treat every major government institution, the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary alike, with contempt as threats to liberty and “natural rights.” As much as Americans love liberty, they also love order and stability. They aren’t likely to react well to the spectacle of conservatives screaming for a virtual revolution against a popularly elected government, the social safety net, and constitutional doctrines that have been in place for 75 years.
So: bring on the Court fight, and bring it on with all the rhetoric Tea Party folk and other radicalized conservatives have been using about Obama’s “socialism” and the Nazi-like tyranny of universal health coverage! Before it’s over, Republicans may wish they had just picked a different fight.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 24, 2010.
Back on February 12, a CNN/New York Times poll gave us our first good look at the Tea Party Movement, and it didn’t confirm the media stereotype of angry average citizens who were somewhere in the “middle” on issues and equally disdained the two parties. Instead it showed the Tea Party folk to be, basically, very conservative Republicans determined to pressure the GOP to move to the right or suffer the consequences–in other words, a radicalized GOP base.
A new poll from Quinnipiac confirms that impression, and it’s really getting to the point where any other intepretation of the Tea Party Movement is probably spin (e.g., among Tea Party leaders who want to maintain their leverage over Republicans by pretending to be more independent than they actually are).
The alternative explanation has been that the Tea Partiers represent independent voters who are fed up with government and will join with Republicans to create a stable majority in this “center-right nation” if and only if Republicans stop talking about cultural issues and focus on lower taxes, smaller government and the economy. Nothing in the Quinnipiac poll supports that proposition. On question after question, self-identified Tea Partiers (13% of the total sample) are much closer in their views to self-identified Republicans than to self-identified independents. Most notably, the approval/disapproval rating for the Republican Party is 60/20 among Tea Partiers and 28/42 among indies. Among those voting in 2008, Tea Partiers went for McCain by a margin of 77/15; indies split down the middle (going for McCain 46/42). Tea Partiers have a favorable view of Sarah Palin by a 72/14 margin (significantly higher than among Republicans), while indies have an unfavorable view of her by a 49/34 margin. Tea Partiers self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaners by a 74/16 margin. These are not the same people by any stretch of the imagination.
The poll doesn’t ask enough questions to get at the details of Tea Party ideology, but it also doesn’t supply any ammunition to the common perception that Tea Partiers are libertarians at heart, and/or that they are displacing the Christian Right within the conservative coalition. Actually, 21% of self-identified white “born-again” evangelicals consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, well above the 13% figure for all voters. And the the two categories of voters share a rare positive attachment to Sarah Palin (white “born-agains” approve of her by a 55/29 margin, Tea Partiers by a 72/14 margin).
At some point, the more questionable assumptions that pundits are making about the Tea Folk–they are right-trending independents, they are hostile to the Christian Right–need to yield to empirical evidence. Now would be a good time to start.
UPDATE: I should have probably mentioned that Quinnipiac has undermined the findings of its own poll by releasing it with this title: “Tea Party Could Hurt GOP In Congressional Races, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Dems Trail 2-Way Races, But Win If Tea Party Runs.” That’s based on a few questions offering three-way trial heats of unidentified Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers. Since there will not actually be such contests in November beyond a few scattered races with virtually unknown independent candidates claiming kinship with the Tea Parties, the whole line of reasoning is specious.

This item by James Vega was first published on March 23, 2010.
In the last days before the HCR bill passed the house last Sunday several influential progressive bloggers put forth a rather startling thesis — that although the health care bill was still worth passing, the compromises that were required to enact it actually made the bill a setback or defeat for progressives rather than a victory. For example:

• Jeff Greenwald in Salon – “…this process highlighted – and worsened – the virtually complete powerlessness of the left and progressives generally in Washington.…no one will ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future”
• Jane Hamsher in Firedoglake- “nobody will take progressives in Congress seriously, nor should they…Whatever Barack Obama wants to do will be the farthest left any piece of legislation gets.”
• McJoan in DailyKos – “Trying to argue that the provisions in this bill signify a progressive victory is from my perspective a negotiating mistake…I’d argue that it’s bad politically and for future policy for progressives to lose sight of the fact that we had some pretty big losses in this one. Who lost? Labor…Women…Latinos.”

To be very clear, unlike some other, more extreme critics, all three of these commentators did indeed agree that the bill needed to be passed and none advocated its rejection. But, as the quotes show, they were also united in the view that the compromises embodied in the final bill made it represent a major defeat for progressives.
A progressive Rip Van Winkle from the social movements of the 60’s, suddenly waking up today, would be profoundly bewildered by this perspective. He or she would not be at all surprised to hear that a progressive reform had been “diluted”, “sold-out” “watered down” or “compromised” in the process of passing a bill in Congress. But what he or she would find utterly baffling were the implicit assumptions that underlay the argument.
1. That it was possible to directly identify the broad progressive campaign for universal and affordable health care with the quality of any one specific piece of legislation.
2. That the major measure of progressive “influence” on the struggle for a social reform like universal and affordable health care could properly be defined as how far an initial bill proposed in Congress could be pushed in a progressive direction, a view that essentially identifies all progressive “influence” with bargaining power inside the halls of Congress.
3. That progressives could reasonably expect to achieve a genuinely significant social reform without having first built a vibrant and genuine grass-roots social movement deeply committed to that reform.
In fact, it would actually take the newly awakened 60’s progressive several re-readings of the various commentaries to fully convince himself that these actually were the implicit assumptions underlying the debate. On all three topics, the 60’s movement progressive would start off with almost directly opposite assumptions.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was first published on March 22, 2010
For many months now, we’ve been hearing the GOP threat that Democrats will pay dearly for supporting the health care reform package. Now might be a good time to ask conversely whether any House Dems who voted against the bill will lose support in November.
Most of the 34 Dems who crossed over to support the Republicans in the key vote should be safe, just because of the power of incumbency, which is strong even for members of the party in power in mid-term elections. One exception might be GA Democratic Rep. John Barrow, whose 12th congressional district, which stretches from Savannah to Augusta, includes 44 percent African American voters. Presidential nominee Obama cut an ad for Barrow in his last campaign, so Barrow’s negative HCR vote may alienate some of his district’s stronger supporters of President Obama and/or HCR. Barrow did defeat an African American primary challenger in 2008, but other Black leaders in his district must be wondering if they could unhorse Barrow in the Democratic primary.
Rep. Artur Davis (AL), the only African American congressman to oppose the HCR package, on the other hand, won’t be vulnerable to a primary challenge because he is running for Governor of Alabama. Davis won three of his terms by landslides and one with no opposition. Clearly, he sees his vote against HCR as a net asset for his gubernatorial campaign. He may be right, although even in AL, his HCR vote could hurt with state progressives in a close election.
Race would not be the only consideration, however, in assessing constituent disapproval of the votes against health care reform. A few of the 34 nay voters, including Heath Shuler (NC) and Stephen Lynch (MA) have substantial liberal enclaves/constituencies in their districts, which could make a difference as stay-at-homes in a close election.
Here is The Hill’s list of the 34 Dems who voted no on health care reform:

Rep. John Adler (N.J.)
Rep. Jason Altmire (Pa.)
Rep. Michael Arcuri (N.Y.)
Rep. John Barrow (Ga.)
Rep. Marion Berry (Ark.)
Rep. Dan Boren (Ind.)
Rep. Rick Boucher (Va.)
Rep. Bobby Bright (Ala.)
Rep. Ben Chandler (Ky.)
Rep. Travis Childers (Miss.)
Rep. Artur Davis (Ala.)
Rep. Lincoln Davis (Tenn.)
Rep. Chet Edwards (Texas)
Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.)
Rep. Tim Holden (Pa.)
Rep. Larry Kissell (N.C.)
Rep. Frank Kratovil (Md.)
Rep. Dan Lipinski (Ill.)
Rep. Stephen Lynch (Mass.)
Rep. Jim Marshall (Ga.)
Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah)
Rep. Mike McIntyre (N.C.)
Rep. Mike McMahon (N.Y.)
Rep. Charlie Melancon (La.)
Rep. Walt Minnick (Idaho)
Rep. Glenn Nye (Va.)
Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.)
Rep. Mike Ross (Ark.)
Rep. Heath Shuler (N.C.)
Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.)
Rep. Zack Space (Ohio)
Rep. John Tanner (Tenn.)
Rep. Gene Taylor (Miss.)
Rep. Harry Teague (N.M.)

In addition to the power of incumbency, what these Dems have going for them is that it is late for primary challengers to start new campaigns, if they haven’t already. Some of the 34 will also likely be getting lots of love in the form of dough from insurance companies and the like.
I’m sure that some of the Dem nay voters acted on principle, though all probably saw their votes as a matter of political survival. Sad, however, that they chose to be part of the fear-driven past, rather than the hopeful future. They risked hurting their party, as well as the health of their constituents. As E.J. Dionne, Jr. put it in his WaPo column:

To understand how large a victory this is, consider what defeat would have meant. In light of the president’s decision to gamble all of his standing to get this bill passed, its failure would have crippled his presidency. The Democratic Congress would have become a laughing stock, incapable of winning on an issue that has been central to its identity since the days of Harry Truman.

For Dems there’s always the thorny problem of primary challenges usually helping the Republicans. Of course, Boehner and company will praise the 34 Dems to the hilt, and then do everything they can to replace them with Republicans, where possible. All of those who are running this year are banking to some extent on most HCR supporters forgiving and forgetting by November, which could be a dicey bet. And President Obama may have a Lincolnesque capacity for political forgiveness, but Rahm Emmanuel most emphatically does not.
It may not be fair to pigeon-hole all of these Dems as DINO’s, since they vote with their party most of the time. That’s life in the big tent. Still, progressive Dems can’t be blamed for asking, if they are not with us on such a central legislative reform, one which could save many lives and one which could have decided the President’s re-election chances, then who are they?

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 19, 2010.
As we count down towards the health reform vote(s) in the House, it’s clearer than ever that there are two distinct but mutually reinforcing conservative takes on the bill. The most obvious, of course, is the bizarre construction of “ObamaCare” that the Right has been building for nearly a year now, based on distortions, fear-mongering, a few outright lies, and sweeping smears, all in order to make legislation pretty close to what moderate Republicans have promoted for years seem like a socialist revolution if not a coup d’etat. This is the hard sell, and it will continue up to and well beyond this weekend’s votes.
But then there’s the soft sell, beloved of today’s model of “moderate” Republicans, such as they are, which involves lots of tut-tutting at the unedifying spectacle of the health reform debate, constant if unsupported claims that there are plentiful opportunities for a bipartisan “incremental” approach, and above all, phony concern for what Barack Obama is doing to his party and his country. This approach typically ignores or rationalizes the hard sell that most conservatives have undertaken, and the lockstep obstructionism of the congressional GOP, and blames Obama and Democrats for all the problems they are encountering in getting this legislation done.
A pitch-perfect example of the soft sell is Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, presumably her final pre-vote expression of contempt for the president in the guise of respect for the presidency, which alas, isn’t what it used to be when her mentor, Ronald Reagan, stood astride Washington and the globe like a colossus.
The column begins with an extended expression of horror that Obama would postpone a trip to Indonesia and Australia in order to lobby for this little domestic bill that would deal with the trifle of health coverage for 40 million or so Americans:

And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend.
How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid’s stuff.

It’s characteristic that Noonan does not mention that Obama is trying to give Americans the universal health coverage that Australians have and take for granted, or that final passage wouldn’t have been delayed until now if Scott Brown hadn’t come to Washington pledging to kill “ObamaCare.”
Noonan then engages, with the air of someone examining an especially loathsome insect, in a lengthy attack on the procedural issues involved in House passage of health reform, asserting that Obama’s trying to hide something in the legislation via the “deem and pass” (which she suggests sounds tellingly like “demon pass”) mechanism that House Democrats are apparently going to deploy this weekend. She endorses as self-evidently correct the complaint of Fox News’ Bret Bair, in his obnoxious interview of the president last week, that “deem and pass” means nobody will know what’s in the bill that’s “deemed” and “passed.” Like Bair, Noonan doesn’t seem to understand the simple fact that the underlying bill we are talking about here is exactly the same bill passed by the Senate in December–long enough even for Peggy Noonan to have gotten wind of it. The changes in the bill–namely, the reconciliation measure–were made available, along with a CBO scoring of their impact, before the votes were scheduled, and will be voted on explicitly by the House (and later the Senate). Yes, this is complicated, but you’d think someone with Noonan’s experience and pay grade would be able to figure it out, and again, Democrats would have never resorted to this approach if Republicans weren’t using their 41st Senate vote to thwart the normal process after a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate had already passed similar legislation.
But whatever; Republican obstruction is never much mentioned in Noonan’s stuff on health reform. And so it is entirely in character that Noonan concludes her column by blaming Obama for the rudeness exhibited by Bair in last week’s interview, and hence for diminishing the presidency! Ah, if only we had a real president like you-know-who:

[W]e seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing.

I’d say it’s hardly as revealing as Peggy Noonan’s inveterate habit of not only ignoring conservative hubris, but attributing it to its victims.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 19, 2010.
There’s been some interesting talk going on this week involving assessment (in the wake of the collapse of progressive resistance to the final health reform bill) of “the Left’s” strategy on health reform, particularly in terms of the ultimate emptiness of threats from progressive House Democrats that they would vote against any bill that didn’t include a “robust” public option.
Glenn Greenwald argues that progressives have once again exposed–and possibly even increased–their “powerlessness” within the Democratic Party. Chris Bowers challenges the premise by arguing that progressives did secure significant changes in the Senate bill, most notably the agreement to “fix” it, which certainly wasn’t the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, Armando of Talk Left has compared the lack of leverage of progressives over items like the public option to the success of the labor movement in forcing concessions on the “Cadillac tax.” And Nate Silver has responded by arguing that progressive threats didn’t work because they weren’t credible in the first place.
I think everyone in this debate would agree that it’s generally a bad idea in politics to make threats you are entirely unwilling to carry out, but the real division of opinion on on whether such threats should be tempered or in fact intensified. But Nate makes one point that bears repeating: the political value of aggressiveness and posturing can and often does get exaggerated.

It feels good to assert that progressives just need to be tougher — perhaps even to the point of feigning irrationality. These arguments are not necessarily wrong — a reputation for being tougher bargainers would help at the margins — but it misdiagnoses the problem on health care. The progressive bloc failed not because of any reputational deficiency on the part of the progressives but because their bluff was too transparent — they claimed to be willing to wager enormous stakes (health care reform) to win a relatively small pot (the public option). That would have been beyond the capacity of any poker player — or activist — to pull off.

I’ve never much liked the strain of progressive analysis that endlessly promotes “fighting” and “spine” and “cojones” as the answers to every Democratic political problem. Sometimes “brains” or “heart” are more important, and moreover, if politics is reduced to a willingness to project brute force, the bad guys are going to win every time; it’s like getting into a selfishness competition with the Right–we’ll never win. But in any event, however you feel about the Will to Power theory of politics, Nate’s right, people aren’t all stupid, and macho posturing by progressives when it doesn’t make sense isn’t going to convince anybody. Poker playing is a relatively small and overrated part of politics. Real conviction and strategies based on conveying those convictions to friends and potential friends are the best building blocks for successful strategy.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 12, 2010.
One of the fundamental reasons for the kind of strategic analysis that TDS encourages and sponsors is that it’s sometimes easy to conflate strategy and tactics, and more basically, means and ends. Indeed, I’d contend that most of the major disagreements among Democrats are attributable to this problem of arguing past each other because one side or the other is thinking in different terms about where a particular political or policy decision lies on the continuum that extends from day-to-day tactics all the way over to grand strategy. And that has certainly been true in the health care reform debate.
But we should all be able to agree on one thing: the ultimate objective in politics–particularly progressive politics–is to make changes in public policy that have a real, beneficient impact on the real-life experiences of the American people. When that opportunity presents itself on one of the major challenges facing this country, taking advantage of it trumps a lot of otherwise valid considerations.
And so, in all the back-and-forth this week about polling on health reform, and the possible consequences to the Democratic Party this November of enacting or failing to enact legislation, it is important not to forget the big picture here: the responsibility that most Democrats would accept for meeting the challenge of changing the health care system in a positive direction.
Matt Yglesias offers a good analogy to keep in mind in weighing the political risks involved in enacting health care reform this year:

[T]he measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

From that perspective, there are still important short-term political factors for Democrats to keep in mind: the impact of future Republican gains on other important policy goals, and even the possibility that those gains will be so large that the next Congress or the one after that will repeal health reform legislation. Short of that, though, it’s probably a moment for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize and let the political chips fall where they may. It’s not as though we haven’t faced and overcome political adversity before, when we didn’t necessarily have the chance to make large progress on one of the enduring policy goals of the party going back more than a half-century.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 10, 2010.
One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.